As a child, I was lucky enough to go to the sea. I knew those afternoons when, in the space of 10 minutes, the water becomes cloudy, the sky darkens and shy droplets set to fall from the sky. My brother and I were running from the droplets in the water. So as not to get wet, they said.
Posted at 4:00 p.m.
The Alliance Saint-Laurent is this race towards the water, this full and complete submersion in a new paradigm when the droplets are on our heels. Recognition of the legal personality of the St. Lawrence River does not claim to be the messianic solution that will solve the climate crisis, but it is a powerful legal tool that could change the situation. And that, some municipalities have understood.
On December 6, the City of Sorel-Tracy adopted a resolution in support of the Alliance Saint-Laurent. The following week, the City of Sainte-Catherine followed suit and the Mamuitun Tribal Council, bringing together five Innu First Nations, also formalized its support. These entities thus become the first governance bodies to officially ask the government to grant legal personality to the St. Lawrence River.
The Saint-Laurent Alliance is an initiative of the International Observatory for the Rights of Nature launched in 2018. Since then, several players from the Quebec environmental scene have joined: SNAP Quebec, Eau Secours, Strategies Saint-Laurent, CentrEau , EcotoQ, Waterlution, Écomaris and the Semoir. Together, we are working so that on March 22, 2022, World Water Day, a bill to grant legal personality to the St. Lawrence River is tabled.
A legal personality
In our legal framework, recognition and compensation for harm suffered by a natural entity depends on the existence of human harm. This means that in order to take legal action, a human being must suffer damage.
By granting the river rights such as the right to its restoration and preservation, this requirement is swept away: a legal action could be brought simply because its rights are seriously infringed.
Our approach is preventive in that it allows us to sound the alarm before a human being is affected.
Integrated management
Faced with the pollution to which the river was subjected in the 1950s, the Quebec government set up the Legendre commission in 1968. The first report, published in 1970, recommended tightening the legal framework for water management. In 2009, the Law affirming the collective nature of water resources and promoting better governance of water and associated environments1 enshrines the principle of integrated water management, entrusting watershed organizations (OBV) with the task of developing an integrated management plan. Regional consultation tables (TCR), for their part, are created by decree to assume a planning and harmonization role. Some 40 years later, it is still difficult to speak of integrated management: the OBVs do not have the river as their object and only 6 of the 12 TCRs have been set up.
Our bill responds to these blind spots by proposing the appointment of guardians from government, municipalities, First Nations and environmental organizations who will represent the St. Lawrence River before the courts and act in its best interests, as well as the creation of strategic committees at regional and national levels to coordinate water uses. It will be an integrated and holistic management in which the municipalities and the First Nations will be the main actors.
The big winners
When the Quebec government decentralized the management of water infrastructures in the 1990s to confer this power on municipalities, they were underfunded. It is therefore no surprise that they have proven to be major players in water contamination. In 2020, approximately 700 municipalities were responsible for 53,000 wastewater spills. 2
Faced with this observation, our project bridges the gap between the right of human beings to water and sanitation and the right of the river to clean water. If the St. Lawrence River has the right to clean water, the riverside municipalities will, by correlation, be responsible for cleaning up their wastewater and will be able to obtain funds from the governments to meet their obligations. The underfunding that is their obsession could be appeased, in particular, by the sum of 1 billion promised by the federal government to restore and protect river ecosystems.3.
Our discussions with the Ministry of the Environment have underscored the persuasive value of supporting resolutions from municipalities. Considering their powers to ensure water quality, the municipalities truly represent the keystone of our project. Sorel-Tracy and Sainte-Catherine have paved a road waiting to be taken by other municipalities.
The project is far-reaching, but the law is a vector of social change that nearly 30 States have already used to undertake steps similar to ours.
Quite recently, Quebec was added to the list with the Mutehekau Shipu (Magpie) river. In New Zealand, this change of paradigm constitutes a cornerstone in the reconciliation between the government and the Maoris, who have renewed their link with the territory, of which they had been deprived by British colonization. Inspired by the New Zealand model, our bill also represents a way to promote reconciliation with the First Nations of Canada.
Six years ago, I was babysitting two boys. At night, we’d sit at the foot of the bed and I’d tell them a story – not a book, Laura, just a story. And I started without knowing where this story would go or how it would end. I believe our mission at the Observatory is to find a story you believe in and then tell it to bring about change. The Alliance will not tell us more about the end, but it adds new characters with their own agency and offers new avenues.
Between the defeatism and the blind optimism that underlie discourse on the environment, making the St. Lawrence River a subject of law represents a tool that sets the conditions for the possibility of better environmental protection. And to do this, we need the support of Quebec municipalities.
* Co-signatories: Alexandra Baer, head of liaison with indigenous peoples at the International Observatory for the Rights of Nature and student at the École du Barreau du Québec; Yenny Vega Cárdenas, president of the International Observatory for the Rights of Nature and lawyer, specialist in water law